Sunstrikuuu

I'm fine with it being a thing if you're, like, Real Madrid and you're bringing Mbappe off the bench up 3-0 in an early-round Copa del Rey game. When it's a youth player? Or a guy who wants more playing time? Or a forward coming off the bench at 0-0 in the Champions League final? Seriously?

Yeah, Pathfinder generally was built on the 3E chassis, which doesn't have bounded accuracy. Owlcat's build their game for more of a high-op rules-focused specialized audience rather than a general gaming one, and it shows.

That was probably the motivation but the 5E rules aren't that complicated in cRPG terms. You make the number go up. 5E is designed around bounded accuracy, so even small increases to static numbers have large effects. And Larian missed the memo when they started tinkering with items and at what level they're available; the enemies are basically balanced to tabletop rules but players are given something like 10x the magic items, both in number and in amplitude, that they should. Player characters are enormously more powerful than they ought to be, so I struggle to believe that avoiding miss strings is the actual effect of Karmic Dice. When the game is balanced around a +3 bonus but obtaining a +8 or +10 is trivial, misses pretty much stop being an issue.

Karmic dice annoyed people (and the standard, correct advice is to turn it off) for reasons that specifically have to do with D&D rules. There's not a clear parallel to FM. In D&D 5E, the ruleset BG3 is based on, skill checks -- what you'd use to persuade people or pick a lock or identify something -- are handled by picking a random number from 1-20 and adding a modifier. Generally speaking, the threshold that the number plus modifier needs to reach is between 5, for a very easy task, and 25, for an extremely difficult task. In some cases, a player can have Advantage or Disadvantage; with Advantage, they roll two 20-sided dice and use the higher of the two numbers. Disadvantage uses the lower of the two. Because the d20 roll's range is so large compared to most static modifiers, skill checks are approached in two ways: either avoid making the roll at all or boost your modifier to such a high level that failure is impossible. BG3 implements a very bad variant rule that screws up the math. In combat, d20 rolls are used for a bunch of things, and a roll of 20 is an automatic success while a 1 is an automatic failure. This rule does not exist for skill checks. Larian, in their oh so infinite wisdom, decided that it should. That means every character, no matter how skillful at a particular task, fails that task 5% of the time on a roll of 1. Karmic dice are outcome-based dice; they exist to prevent strings of successes or failures. So if you build a character who happens to be Johnny Persuadesalot, a guy who's so persuasive and convincing that he can argue night into day and lions into lambs, and you go through dialogue trees convincing people to help you or not oppose you, talking your way out of combats and into rewards, you'll be succeeding at a lot of checks. And as you do, karmic dice increases the chances that you'll roll a 1 to balance your successes and failures. The FM equivalent might be doing a youth-only save and having your regens' PA artificially deflated because you were sending too many youth products into the first team. Karmic dice also does in-combat balancing, which hurts people who know how to use the rules to build characters. See, Larian don't understand the 5E rules and, in particular, the principle of bounded accuracy they're built upon. They've added a lot of ways to increase defensive and offensive modifiers, and it turns out that without some monkeying in the backend it's possible to just build a character that's only hit 5% of the time. Karmic dice flattens out some but not all of the differences between highly-optimized and poorly-optimized character builds, meaning people who don't use the rules well can still progress through the game and people who do still face some jeopardy. There are also a whole bunch of bugs related to sources of Advantage incorrectly applying and rolls of 1 not being discarded correctly in Advantage situations, but those are, at least, bugs and not deliberate, shortsighted design decisions. (They're the root of some of the conspiracy theories about rigged RNG, too, because players see a Critical Fail on a roll with Advantage and think "that's the third time this particular event has happened in an hour, I am suspicious", when what's actually happening is that the source of Advantage isn't being correctly applied, so it's a 5% chance not a 0.25% chance, as it should be.) Unrelated to FM, I know, but worth clarifying here because Karmic Dice is actually a situation where the developer is putting their thumb on the scale. It's not entirely unlike the Super-Keeper conspiracy -- if you build a great attacking team in FM and the AI can't handle you, the keeper will get some insane boost and yadda yadda yadda. Karmic Dice in BG3 is like the keeper getting a little boost, not huge, just enough that your 5-0 win becomes 2-0.

Lotta negotiations like "I would like 5." "Well, how about 3?" "Actually I would like 10." "Wait why not 4?" "I'm never speaking to you again."

wallace asks for a new contract, wallace's agent asks for a specific wage, i agree to that wage, wallace's agent asks for more money than what we agreed on two seconds ago in the negotiations, wallace rejects a contract offer, wallace's agent will not come to the table again, promise reminder: wallace is expecting to be offered a new contract, can't offer him a new contract the option doesn't even exist in the menu, can't tell him his agent is preventing talks because managers aren't allowed to talk to their players i guess, please dear sweet mother of god KILL THIS WHOLE SYSTEM WITH FIRE. Agents are bad and pointless, promises are bad and actively damaging to your game, just get rid of all of this garbage.

Hell of a month. 26-0 aggregate score in a three-games-in-six-days run.

With my luck they'd keep being the same.

That's also how wage negotiation works. The agent says £30,000/week, but what he means is £30kpw, plus a 10% annual wage increase plus kicker clauses that double his wage at 5 and 15 club appearances, and if you tell him you'll pay £30kpw he'll close negotiations.

In the screenshot above, my right attacking midfielder is assigned to tightly mark the right of two DMs. As Atletico play out from the back, you can see that he's there. Nice. My CAM, though, is wide right, but is assigned to tightly mark the left of the two DMs, so he's on the wrong side of the pitch. The LAM is assigned to mark tightly the left of the two centerbacks, and he's way too deep, marking another player entirely. And then we get that classic passing move where the ball goes tap-tap-tap down the pitch as players 'mark' their assignments by standing behind them. When the ball gets into the final third, the Atletico attacker turns into an idiot and trips over the ball, letting a defender take it away.

Even the way the game has you speaking with coaches is over-aggressive. If you ask a coach to teach a player a PPM that's critical to your tactic -- let's say a technical DM/CM with high passing, and you want to teach them to come deep to get the ball and to dictate tempo -- and the coach doesn't think it will work, your options are 'don't start the training', 'what do you think we should do?' or 'shut your absolute hole you complete incompetent, just do what i tell you'. Seriously, imagine being a manager with, like, Daniele de Rossi as your coach and saying "I have much greater experience of what benefits a player's game". And then imagine that coach saying 'ok but it's going to be a waste of time'.

They sound like children. Not like 'teenagers are children' but like five or six year olds. And you're right, it's not just player interactions. Your board will deny you something tiny -- an extra scout, say -- then tell you they'll listen if you 'put forward a compelling case', then whatever you say they'll tell you not to waste their time in the future. Waste your time? I've won the first European trophy in the history of the club! I've gotten you promoted five times! I built your stadium! What the fork do you mean, don't waste my time? You shouldn't be wasting my time!

In Arsenal's last three matches IRL, they've conceded six goals from 2.5 xGA and scored 1 from 6.47 xG. It's super frustrating but does happen.

"I'd rather get what I want without much of a discussion about it" yeah that's cool, that's nice, my player is a six year old. Who thought this was a good idea?

I haven't found one.